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sarea
In preparation for Jade's visit, I have been busily buying board games. There's no way we will have time to play them all, but that won't stop us from trying! The latest is Saboteur, from the publisher of Pandemic. It's almost like the Mafia party game. Basically, an unknown person or persons tries to sabotage the rest.
When I was still playing WoW, my guild would play Mafia on our guild forums. It was so freaking fun -- toward the end, it was more fun than WoW itself. For playing online, basically, you have a game mod, and they assign roles to each player. Most players are townspeople (depending how complex you want to get with the game, each townsperson can have a specific role, like "cop"), and a small subset are Mafia members (and again, depending on complexity they could have specific roles). With big games, you might even have two different Mafia families. Anyway, during the "day" everybody talks (so it's better with active players who will actually post) and judging by what's said, you all vote to see who you will lynch. The day ends when someone gets the right amount of votes to be lynched. The mod reveals whether that player was a Mafia member or an innocent townsperson. Night falls. The Mafia members are allowed to conspire and decide who they're going to murder in the night. A townsperson (or member of opposing Mafia) dies, and the mod reveals who it is and what role they played. Day dawns again and it starts all over, until the Mafia or the Town prevail in the end. SO FUN.
Anyway, so yeah. I'm looking forward to trying that out, playing the Matt Leacock game Lunatix Loop, Ticket to Ride: Europe (which is more complex and therefore more fun than the U.S. one), Puerto Rico, and of course, Pandemic. :D
Plus there's spending time with Jade and our planned Obsess Me! challenge. What is this, you might ask? (Or not, but I'm going to tell you anyway.) We each get 10 hours of TV time to make the other watch anything we want. The purpose, of course, being that we want to get each other into the various shows that we enjoy that the other isn't watching. In the last few years or so, we have been diverging a LOT in what we choose to watch. We only have a few shows in common now, which is shocking, SHOCKING. She doesn't watch: Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Downton Abbey, Sherlock, Community, Parks & Rec, The Wire, The Good Wife or Breaking Bad. I don't watch Leverage, The New Girl, 2 Broke Girls, SNL and I don't even know what else. The point is that we have very few shows that intersect, so this is our chance to try and intersect more. The problem is that we naturally gravitate toward certain kinds of shows. I'm not generally a sitcom person (though of course there are a few exceptions, for truly quality programming, as I see it <g>), while she's not as much a drama person. She prefers light-hearted comedy and romance, while I prefer angst and epic plots. :)) I'm biased, naturally, but I'm like, "I like substance, she likes mind candy." :)))) That's NOT to say that we only watch shows that fall into those respective buckets, but looking at our current lineup, drama vs comedy is how I'd generally delineate it. Maybe someone else can be more objective about the differences.
We do have some shows in common, though. How I Met Your Mother, Merlin (though she hasn't seen S4), The Walking Dead, and The Vampire Diaries are the ones that come to mind. Speaking of VD, we're now caught up with what's aired! Just the season finale left.
- Stefan/Elena is SO BORING. How can they not see it??? I'm hoping that because they seemed to be on better terms 3 eps before the finale, this means they'll do something w/ Damon/Elena toward the end.
- In fact, I'm hoping that that is exactly what the head trauma will do. In the books, eventually Elena gets turned into a vampire, and when she wakes, she's All About Damon. I don't see them ever turning Elena on this show (maybe at the very, very end of the series run), but I wonder if they're going to use this head bump to do the same thing! Maybe she'll wake up and have switched affections, since she was torn anyway. We've seen 2 years of her being All About Stefan, it's about time Damon gets his turn, since they've now established that she does have feelings for him. This might be a pipe dream of an idea, but I had to put it out there. :D
- OK, really glad they took my advice to do something more permanent with Alaric... but wow. Now I'm worried that he's going to be killed off! :/ I like him too much to want him dead; but usually when they turn a new character they generally kill them off because they don't actually want all the cast members to be vampires. (Caroline is like, the sole exception.) Also, Alaric is a bit OP atm because he's 'young' but has all this power, including not being affected by the white oak stake. However, if they keep Alaric around, I'll be glad about this development, because he really needed something to do. I really liked his buddy dynamic with Damon, and though that was better when he was human, it could still work if he had his old personality back. Either he's the new Big Bad who will be killed in the finale, or he'll be next season's Big Bad. Hopefully the latter, and at the end of it, they'll 'fix' him so that he can just be a normal vampire, rather than Michael part 2.
- I doubt Klaus is really gone. Unfortunately. The fans seem to like him too much, and the show as well. He'll be back in some way in the finale, though I enjoyed the (oh-so-brief) time thinking he was actually gone. And that they managed to do it in a way that would keep Tyler alive. But there's still one episode to go, and given that they seem to think Tyler is unimportant/expendable (judging from screen time) and Klaus is so great (judging from screen time), I'm sure the tables will be turned. Still, it's interesting that one's life is connected to the other, so either Tyler has to just die, or they both die, or they have to break the bond. The easiest option, of course, is to just kill Tyler. The worst part is that eventually Caroline will get together with Klaus, because that's where it's going, and he'll have been the reason Tyler died and just UGH, when she supposedly loves Tyler. I looooooooved Caroline/Tyler, especially in season 2 when she stays with him throughout his transformation and get they so much closer, from once despising each other. They just made the leap to romance too quickly; their tenuous, budding friendship could have lasted a long time while the UST kept simmering. Sigh. That would have been really good.
- I wish Matt were more useful. I really like him but he has nothing to do, and I don't know how much longer they can really keep him around.
- They need to use WAY less of the "Elena is in danger!" device. It happens so often that I never actually feel like she's in any danger.
- Elijah has disappeared. Again. Sigh. Well, better that than be in danger of being staked and thus killed off the show, I suppose.
In book news, I'm in the middle of like 3 of them at the moment, but they're all going to be shunted aside for City of Lost Souls (Mortal Instruments book 5), which released today. Jace is just too hot to ignore.
I've also given up the ghost wrt my lawn. I've decided to hire a gardener again. (I ended up calling the first gardener I ever had, who maintained my lawn for me for years -- I should never have stopped. But hindsight is 20/20.) I realize that I just can't keep up with how quickly the grass grows now that it's getting warmer, and don't want to. I want to spend my time doing other things, including possibly vegetable gardening again. I was spurred to calling a gardener when I realized that the main reason I haven't gotten up the will to go play in the raised bed is because the lawn is so unkempt/long. It's like being out in the wild. >.> And yeah, it's a little late in the season to try and grow anything this year. I have some cover crop in the bed right now that I still need to tear up and turn over into the dirt, so I wouldn't be able to plant anything until 2-3 weeks after I take care of that... which takes me into June. O.o So this season is probably lost, but we'll see.
When I was still playing WoW, my guild would play Mafia on our guild forums. It was so freaking fun -- toward the end, it was more fun than WoW itself. For playing online, basically, you have a game mod, and they assign roles to each player. Most players are townspeople (depending how complex you want to get with the game, each townsperson can have a specific role, like "cop"), and a small subset are Mafia members (and again, depending on complexity they could have specific roles). With big games, you might even have two different Mafia families. Anyway, during the "day" everybody talks (so it's better with active players who will actually post) and judging by what's said, you all vote to see who you will lynch. The day ends when someone gets the right amount of votes to be lynched. The mod reveals whether that player was a Mafia member or an innocent townsperson. Night falls. The Mafia members are allowed to conspire and decide who they're going to murder in the night. A townsperson (or member of opposing Mafia) dies, and the mod reveals who it is and what role they played. Day dawns again and it starts all over, until the Mafia or the Town prevail in the end. SO FUN.
Anyway, so yeah. I'm looking forward to trying that out, playing the Matt Leacock game Lunatix Loop, Ticket to Ride: Europe (which is more complex and therefore more fun than the U.S. one), Puerto Rico, and of course, Pandemic. :D
Plus there's spending time with Jade and our planned Obsess Me! challenge. What is this, you might ask? (Or not, but I'm going to tell you anyway.) We each get 10 hours of TV time to make the other watch anything we want. The purpose, of course, being that we want to get each other into the various shows that we enjoy that the other isn't watching. In the last few years or so, we have been diverging a LOT in what we choose to watch. We only have a few shows in common now, which is shocking, SHOCKING. She doesn't watch: Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Downton Abbey, Sherlock, Community, Parks & Rec, The Wire, The Good Wife or Breaking Bad. I don't watch Leverage, The New Girl, 2 Broke Girls, SNL and I don't even know what else. The point is that we have very few shows that intersect, so this is our chance to try and intersect more. The problem is that we naturally gravitate toward certain kinds of shows. I'm not generally a sitcom person (though of course there are a few exceptions, for truly quality programming, as I see it <g>), while she's not as much a drama person. She prefers light-hearted comedy and romance, while I prefer angst and epic plots. :)) I'm biased, naturally, but I'm like, "I like substance, she likes mind candy." :)))) That's NOT to say that we only watch shows that fall into those respective buckets, but looking at our current lineup, drama vs comedy is how I'd generally delineate it. Maybe someone else can be more objective about the differences.
We do have some shows in common, though. How I Met Your Mother, Merlin (though she hasn't seen S4), The Walking Dead, and The Vampire Diaries are the ones that come to mind. Speaking of VD, we're now caught up with what's aired! Just the season finale left.
- Stefan/Elena is SO BORING. How can they not see it??? I'm hoping that because they seemed to be on better terms 3 eps before the finale, this means they'll do something w/ Damon/Elena toward the end.
- In fact, I'm hoping that that is exactly what the head trauma will do. In the books, eventually Elena gets turned into a vampire, and when she wakes, she's All About Damon. I don't see them ever turning Elena on this show (maybe at the very, very end of the series run), but I wonder if they're going to use this head bump to do the same thing! Maybe she'll wake up and have switched affections, since she was torn anyway. We've seen 2 years of her being All About Stefan, it's about time Damon gets his turn, since they've now established that she does have feelings for him. This might be a pipe dream of an idea, but I had to put it out there. :D
- OK, really glad they took my advice to do something more permanent with Alaric... but wow. Now I'm worried that he's going to be killed off! :/ I like him too much to want him dead; but usually when they turn a new character they generally kill them off because they don't actually want all the cast members to be vampires. (Caroline is like, the sole exception.) Also, Alaric is a bit OP atm because he's 'young' but has all this power, including not being affected by the white oak stake. However, if they keep Alaric around, I'll be glad about this development, because he really needed something to do. I really liked his buddy dynamic with Damon, and though that was better when he was human, it could still work if he had his old personality back. Either he's the new Big Bad who will be killed in the finale, or he'll be next season's Big Bad. Hopefully the latter, and at the end of it, they'll 'fix' him so that he can just be a normal vampire, rather than Michael part 2.
- I doubt Klaus is really gone. Unfortunately. The fans seem to like him too much, and the show as well. He'll be back in some way in the finale, though I enjoyed the (oh-so-brief) time thinking he was actually gone. And that they managed to do it in a way that would keep Tyler alive. But there's still one episode to go, and given that they seem to think Tyler is unimportant/expendable (judging from screen time) and Klaus is so great (judging from screen time), I'm sure the tables will be turned. Still, it's interesting that one's life is connected to the other, so either Tyler has to just die, or they both die, or they have to break the bond. The easiest option, of course, is to just kill Tyler. The worst part is that eventually Caroline will get together with Klaus, because that's where it's going, and he'll have been the reason Tyler died and just UGH, when she supposedly loves Tyler. I looooooooved Caroline/Tyler, especially in season 2 when she stays with him throughout his transformation and get they so much closer, from once despising each other. They just made the leap to romance too quickly; their tenuous, budding friendship could have lasted a long time while the UST kept simmering. Sigh. That would have been really good.
- I wish Matt were more useful. I really like him but he has nothing to do, and I don't know how much longer they can really keep him around.
- They need to use WAY less of the "Elena is in danger!" device. It happens so often that I never actually feel like she's in any danger.
- Elijah has disappeared. Again. Sigh. Well, better that than be in danger of being staked and thus killed off the show, I suppose.
In book news, I'm in the middle of like 3 of them at the moment, but they're all going to be shunted aside for City of Lost Souls (Mortal Instruments book 5), which released today. Jace is just too hot to ignore.
I've also given up the ghost wrt my lawn. I've decided to hire a gardener again. (I ended up calling the first gardener I ever had, who maintained my lawn for me for years -- I should never have stopped. But hindsight is 20/20.) I realize that I just can't keep up with how quickly the grass grows now that it's getting warmer, and don't want to. I want to spend my time doing other things, including possibly vegetable gardening again. I was spurred to calling a gardener when I realized that the main reason I haven't gotten up the will to go play in the raised bed is because the lawn is so unkempt/long. It's like being out in the wild. >.> And yeah, it's a little late in the season to try and grow anything this year. I have some cover crop in the bed right now that I still need to tear up and turn over into the dirt, so I wouldn't be able to plant anything until 2-3 weeks after I take care of that... which takes me into June. O.o So this season is probably lost, but we'll see.
